Erin DeBarber couldn’t find a general contractor to work on her home. It initially prompted frustration, then she had an idea.
“I thought, ‘Well, if I can’t hire anyone, then there must be a good opportunity and jobs available,’” DeBarber said.
The 35-year-old had spent a decade in marketing before moving from California to the Hancock County town of Franklin. She enrolled in a two-year associate degree program in building construction at Eastern Maine Community College in Bangor. She ended up assisting a local contractor to do the work on her home.
She is part of a new wave of younger people who are going into the building trades through the state’s network of technical centers and community colleges. They are recognizing the high demand and solid wages that are being driven in part by the housing affordability crisis, but experts and policymakers say that Maine needs many more of them.
“There is a shortage of homes and of construction workers, and we’re doing our best to fill that need,” Bruce Randall, one of DeBarber’s instructors at EMCC, said. “Right now, we’re turning out some really good students that are hopefully going to lead this industry.”
Randall was part of the 30 percent of U.S. construction workers who were laid off after the 2008 economic recession. Since then, workforce shortages have plagued the construction industry and stymied housing production nationwide and in Maine. The problem is compounded by many of those remaining skilled workers hitting retirement age in recent years.
Maine needs to construct at least 76,000 new homes by 2030 in order to accommodate the state’s existing and future residents, a landmark study found last October. The low supply is being further constrained by the retiring class of baby boomers. The nation’s oldest state by median age expects to lose 5.3 percent of its working-age population between 2020 and 2030.
“I’m 67 this year, most of the builders out there are my age, and they’re gonna start dying, and there’s nobody to take their place,” Thomas Holzwarth, a building construction instructor at the Capital Area Technical Center in Augusta, said.
Gains are being made at the state level. While construction jobs accounted for 42 percent of all job growth here from 2017 to 2022, according to a state report. Enrollment in construction programs in Maine’s community college’s has increased 48 percent in the last five years.
That figure is still not keeping pace with demand. Only around 3,000 of the more than 46,000 college credentials the Maine Community College System has issued since 2003 have been in the construction trades. That includes associate degrees and certificates in building construction and training in electrical work, plumbing and heating and cooling systems.
Sen. Matt Pouliot, R-Augusta, a member of the Legislature’s housing panel and owner of a real estate agency in his city, said the would like to see that number doubled in the next decade.
“Having less people in the trades and more leaving the profession in the coming decade is going to put more pressure on the cost of labor, and certainly extend timelines for projects,” he said. “The only way out of this problem is by adding more inventory.”
Pouliot wants the state to invest more into programs like those at EMCC and CATC, the latter of which is the technical center serving high-school students in the Augusta area. Both of the institutions give students hands-on experience designing, drafting, estimating and building projects like sheds, furniture and even modular homes.
Often, these educational programs involve actual construction projects that allow students to demonstrate their proficiency to future employers. Each year, EMCC students build a modular single-family home for Habitat for Humanity. High schoolers at the technical center work together to frame sheds every year.
“It opened our eyes to the trades and stuff that we may not experience just doing normal high school,” Chris Pottle, a 17-year-old who attends Winthrop High School, said of his building construction course at CATC. “Instead of just sitting in a classroom the entire time, it definitely is more rewarding. Like you can actually do something and get better.”
Pottle now can confidently make furniture and build sheds and is hoping to start his own business. His classmate, Keith Riggin, has already apprenticed at a local construction company where he “felt very welcomed.”
“It was like they needed me,” he said.
Many students don’t realize how reputable or well-paid construction jobs are. They can earn between $20 to $30 an hour right out of high school, Holzwarth noted. Almost all of his students are going on to jobs in the trades, while the employment rate of these students on completing their courses is near 100 percent at EMCC, Randall said.
There have been talks about expanding the building construction program at EMCC, but it would take more state investment to make it happen, he said. For now, there are just 24 students enrolled in the EMCC program and 27 at CATC’s similar one.
“It’s critical that these kids get out and start businesses, build homes,” Holzwarth said. “There’s just not enough housing.”